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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Interview with Junot Diaz 2008-02-10 18:00:00 Edward Marriott interviews Junot Díaz. 'I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that. I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.' Read More ...

Juan Carlos Onetti - Let the Wind Speak 2008-02-10 17:50:00 Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski reviews Let the Wind Speak (Dejemos hablar al viento),a novel from Uruguayan novelist and short story author Juan Carlos Onetti written in 1979. Onetti is famous for The Shipyard, published in Uruguay in 1961 – a dark story of how a man tries to save an ailing shipyard and fails ingloriously. Let the Wind Speak was written after the author's exile in Spain and is equally ...

Bernardo Atxaga - The Accordionist's Son 2008-02-06 09:49:00 Michael Eaude reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son. Atxaga, born in 1951, came to fame with Obabakoak (1988), a fresh voice in Basque and Spanish literature. The Lone Man, The Lone Woman and Two Brothers followed in the 1990s and are available in English. The Accordionist's Son, first published in the Basque language in 2003, is his most accomplished novel (the wonderful Obabakoak is ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 2008-01-24 06:42:00 David Robson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. The title is promising. Who wants to read about good girls? But then the doubts set in. Will one bad girl be enough? The trouble with bad girls in literature is that they have shot their bolt after a couple of bedroom scenes. Only the best of them - the ones who are good girls underneath - can sustain a whole novel. The Peruvian veteran ...

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles 2008-01-14 13:11:00 Stephen Finucan reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles. For more than 20 years, Arturo Pérez-Reverte made his livelihood in war zones. Working first as a correspondent for the Spanish daily Pueblo, and later as a reporter for Televisión Española, he filed stories from Cyprus, the Falklands, Beirut, El Salvador, Sarajevo – and Eritrea, where for a period of months he was listed as ...

Bernado Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son 2008-01-14 13:08:00 Nick Caistor reviews Bernado Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son. The Basques have a word for it. That word is usually unpronounceable and unconnected to any other European language, reflecting the uniqueness of the history of that troubled, distinctive northern corner of Spain. In The Accordionist's Son , one of these words is zulo, here translated as "hiding-place". Over the 60-year period that the ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 2008-01-14 12:23:00 Miranda France reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. He means "bad" in the good sense, of course - at least at the beginning. It is the summer of 1950, a time our narrator, Ricardo, will remember as the happiest of his life. Living in Miraflores, a smart neighbourhood of Lima, he and other teenagers enjoy a lively social life, discreetly presided over by priests and maiden aunts. Their ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 2008-01-14 12:14:00 James Lasdun reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. Reading a so-so novel by a first-rate author can be a disconcerting experience. Along with the letdown of the book itself, there's the constant muffled sense of a large talent trying to find a way into its own material. Mario Vargas Llosa's immense resources as a novelist are energetically applied to the surface of this tale of obsessive ...

Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son 2008-01-11 06:16:00 Ed King reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son. The publication of his first novel, Obabakoak, in 1993 established Bernardo Atxaga as a literary voice of startling originality and a passionate guardian of Basque national memory. The traumatised characters that populate his novels have, for many, come to embody the open wounds of a community still trying to come to terms with its bloody ...

Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son 2008-01-07 13:14:00 Tom Deveson reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son. “All books, even the harshest, embellish life,” declares David Imaz, the principal narrator of this superb novel. He’s earned the right to say so and the right to be wrong. It’s not smug literary theory but a recognition of the complex relationship between what happens to us and what we say about it. The book moves skilfully between ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 2008-01-07 13:11:00 Peter Kemp reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. The Bad Girl opens with an exhilarating surge of energy. It is 1950, and in Mira-flores, an attractive seaside suburb of the Peruvian capital, Lima, 15-year-old Ricardo Somocurcio is having the summer of his life. Amid the frangipani, jacaranda and jasmine of the neighbourhood’s lush gardens, he and his friends flirt and fall in love for the ...

Nadal Prize 2008 2008-01-07 05:50:00 Francisco Casavella won the 2008 edition of the Nadal Prize with his novel Lo que sé de los vampiros. Please visit SPLALit aStore Spanish Literature ...

Juan Marsé 2008-01-07 05:36:00 Juan Cruz on the 75th anniversary of Juan Marsé. Juan Marsé leyó cuando era niño unas líneas de Ernest Hemingway al principio de Las nieves del Kilimanjaro y toda su vida ha querido alcanzar con su propia escritura la música misteriosa de ese texto. Ahora va a cumplir 75 años, mañana, 8 de enero, y sigue pensando en el sonido de aquel párrafo que le cautivó en la infancia. ...

Zoé Valdés: La cazadora de astros 2008-01-06 17:51:00 Luciana De Mello reviews Zoé Valdés' La cazadora de astros. Aún así, el gesto de rescate es valorable: detrás de la pintora catalana hay una época, una lucha, una ideología para contar. Es justamente un cuadro de Remedios Varo lo que le da nombre a esta novela. La cazadora de astros ha sido cazada. Zoé Valdés atrapó su vida con una mirada y quiso que hiciera de la suya una obra de arte. Read More ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 2008-01-05 18:41:00 Lucinda Byatt reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. Peru's leading contemporary writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, needs little introduction after rising to fame in the boom years of Latin American literature. This latest work combines his political and literary passions, expressed as always with wit and irony, but without the grand scope of his "total novels". The Bad Girl is primarily an analysis ...